The United States is under 250 years old, but some of its maximum archaeological sites are older than Vikings sailors, the Roman empire and the pyramids.
Prehistoric camels, mammoths and other giant people have traveled, which is now new, when it is greener and more humid.
While the weather warmed about 11,000 years ago, Lake Otero Water fell, revealing the digital footprints of humans who lived among those extinct animals. Some even to stick to a vague, providing a rare review of the habit of the old hunters.
Recent studies place some of these fossilized digital footprints between 21,000 and 23,000 years. If the dates are correct, the prior impressions to other archaeological sites in the United States, raising interesting questions that those other people were and how they reached the state of the southwest.
“Where do they come from?” Feder said. “Not parachute to the new Mexico. They will have to come from another place, which means that there are still older places. ” Archaeologists have simply not discovered them yet.
While visitors can soak in the sight of the eponymous white sands, the footprints are currently off-limits.
In the 1970s, archaeologist James M. Adovasio sparked a controversy when he and his colleagues suggested stone tools and other artifacts found in southwestern Pennsylvania belonged to humans who had lived in the area 16,000 years ago.
For decades, scientists had been finding evidence of human habitation that all seemed to be around 12,000 to 13,000 years old, belonging to the Clovis culture. They were long believed to have been the first to cross the Bering land bridge. Humans who arrived in North America before this group are often referred to as pre-Clovis.
At the time, skeptics said that the radiocarbon dating evidence was flawed, AP News reported in 2016. In the years since, more sites that appear older than 13,000 years have been found across the US.
Feder said Adovasio meticulously excavated the site, but there’s still no clear consensus about the age of the oldest artifacts. Still, he said, “that site is absolutely a major, important, significant site.” It helped archaeologists realize humans started arriving on the continent before the Clovis people.
The dig itself is on display at the Heinz History Center, allowing visitors to see an excavation in person.
One site that’s added intriguing evidence to the pre-Clovis theory is located in western Idaho. Humans living there left stone tools and charred bones in a hearth between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating. Other researchers put the dates closer to 11,500 years ago.
These stemmed tools are different from the Clovis fluted projectiles, researchers wrote in a 2019 Science Advances paper.
Some scientists think humans may have been traveling along the West Coast at this time, when huge ice sheets covered Alaska and Canada. “People using boats, using canoes could hop along that coast and end up in North America long before those glacial ice bodies decoupled,” Feder said.
Cooper’s Ferry is located on traditional Nez Perce land, which the Bureau of Land Management holds in public ownership.
In the early 1980s, former Navy SEAL Buddy Page alerted paleontologists and archaeologists to a sinkhole nicknamed “Booger Hole” in the Aucilla River. There, the researchers found mammoth and mastodon bones and stone tools.
They also discovered a mastodon tusk with what appeared to be cut marks believed to be made by a tool. Other scientists have returned to the site more recently, bringing up more bones and tools. They used radiocarbon dating, which established the site as pre-Clovis.
“The stone tools and faunal remains at the site show that at 14,550 years ago, people knew how to find game, fresh water and material for making tools,” Michael Waters, one of the researchers, said in a statement in 2016. “These people were well-adapted to this environment.”
Since the site is both underwater and on private property, it’s not open to visitors.
Scientists study coprolites, or fossilized poop, to learn about the diets of long-dead animals. Mineralized waste can also reveal much more. In 2020, archaeologist Dennis Jenkins published a paper on coprolites from an Oregon cave that were over 14,000 years old.
The Federal Land Management Office owns the land where the caves are located, and are signed at the beginning of historical places.
Every time other people arrived at the Americas, Siberia crossed Beringia, an area of land and sea between Russia and Canada and Alaska. It is now covered with water, however, once a land bridge that connects them.
Although Alaska can have a richness of archaeological evidence of the first Americans, it is also a difficult position to dig. “His excavation season is very close and expensive,” Feder said. Some require a helicopter to achieve, for example.
Blackwater Draw Museum of the University of New Mexico in the East of New Mexico provides the archaeological site between April and October.
One of the reasons why the dates of the human profession in North America are so debatable is that very few old remains have been found. Among the oldest, there is a Sun river boy up, or Xaasaa Na ‘, in the middle of Alaska.
According to this research, humans would possibly succeed in Alaska about 20,000 years ago.
Extending more than 80 feet long and five feet high, rows of curved poverty are wonderful when it shows from above. More than 3,000 years ago, the hunters-gatherers built them in tons of soil. Scientists do not know precisely why other people have built them, whether ceremonial or a state demonstration.
It is a complicated walk to succeed in pictograms (and the NPS warns that it can be dangerously hot in summer) but it is seeing in person, Feder said. “These are artistic geniuses,” he said about artists.
More than 900 years ago, the other town of Puebloan built the White House, which bears the name of the shadow of their clay. Its upper floors are sitting in a sandstone cliff, with a transparent fall of the windows.
The other people of Navajo, also known as Diné, still live in Canyon de Chelly. Diné Alastair journalist Lee Bitsóí recently wrote about some of the sacred and taboo areas. They come with Tsé Yaa Kin, where archaeologists have discovered human remains.
In early 1900, two shaped the Leling Association of Coliff Coliff, hoping to maintain the ruins in the state region of the Southwest. A few years later, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an invoice that designates the Green Mesa as the first national park aimed at “maintaining the works of man. “
The Mesa Verde National Park has a large number of homes, adding the Palais de Falaises. It has more than one hundred rooms and approximately two dozen kivas or ceremonial areas.
With the help of dendrocronology or trees dating, archaeologists learned when the ancestral people built some of those structures and that emigrated outside the doors of the region through the years 1300.
Tourists can see many of those housing on the road, but some are also available after a walk. Some want more tickets and can congested, Feder said.
At that time, he is booming with hunters, farmers and artisans. “It’s an agricultural civilization,” Feder said. “It is a position where raw fabrics arrive thousands kilometers away. ” The researchers also discovered articular wells, potentially discovered in human sacrifices.
Presented in a limestone cliff in Camp Verde, Arizona, this is an apartment, not a castle, and is not connected to Sovereign Aztec Montezuma.
“These other people were architects,” he said. “They had a feeling of beauty. “
Feder said that the accommodation is quite accessible, with a short walk along a path to see it, visitors cannot enter the construction itself.
Hop